(Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing in the streets? Possibly. Yet too much had already been said about change and it failed to convince. This was also predictable. If there is a crisis facing our societies today, it is not about who commands the majority; it is a crisis of the political imagination. Presented with manifestos that looked remarkably similar, the choice was really down to who would not fuck it up the most.
I appreciate calling for a better “imagination” may seem rather trite in the contemporary moment. The election is won. And like “solidarity”, it is a word that has been stripped of meaning, often thrown around by those who in the next breath call for the destruction of great works of art. And yet, faced with this meagre offering, my sense is we’re in desperate need of those who put imagination central to their visionary projects. While the promises of better healthcare, policing, and tighter immigration controls is standard fare, who really believes that anything else will change beyond next week? In other words, just like times past when political ideas were facing the same kind of suffocating greyness, we need time to rekindle the spirit of romanticism.
Romanticism is often associated with late-18th to mid-19th-century artists and poets who broke away from the dreariness of classical world views. Often misunderstood, it has nothing to do with some idealistic flight from the world. And it certainly has nothing to do with nostalgia. Searching for a deeper appreciation of the senses, the romantics insisted on the need to reimagine all the fundamental categories for society, including how we see life, how we encounter nature, and how we respond to changes in an increasingly globalising world.
While frequently associated with the pioneering writings of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, the tradition started much earlier in Florentine Europe. If romanticism is about facing the tragedy of existence, confronting its horrors, yet still finding new reasons to believe in the world, these elements are all apparent in the most magnificent poem ever written, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
Not only did Dante’s intervention have a profound impact on how we understand the relationships among perpetrators, victims and witnesses of violence — he literally invented what Hell looked like. The poet offers us a number of important lessons as we consider the state of politics today. Dante doesn’t turn away from the intolerable conditions faced by the wretched of the earth. Rather, he slowly observes them, and asks questions of Virgil, his educated guide. Dante is a student who doesn’t have ready-made paradigms or solutions to the ills he witnesses, nor does he seek to pass judgment without knowing the context.
Thoughts invariably turn to the crisis in the Middle East, whose implications will be globally felt for decades. What began with the killing and forced abduction of Israelis last year, an act that symbolically brought back memories of the Holocaust, has resulted in the devastation of Gaza. The absence of any rigorous debate on this issue was telling during the campaign. This can no doubt be partly explained by the vitriolic impasses of a social media infused by identity politics. But we should expect more. As the romantics understood, being a visionary is not about tribal dogmatism. It’s about creating the conditions where the freedom to think and critique can flourish.
In the Comedy’s third canto, Dante wrote that “the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis”. We shouldn’t expect our leaders to be perfect. But we should ask them to be human, which means letting us know what they really think and feel. Starmer was so fearful of putting a foot wrong, he ended up appearing robotic. He was afraid to confront the intolerable and its complexities; he maintained his neutrality in a time of crisis.
But there is also something deeper taking place in this poem. Let us not forget it was written out of Dante’s lingering love for Beatrice Portinari, his muse who died aged just 24. This fact in itself offers another lesson, particularly for those who woke up this morning in need of motivation. After all, deeply felt ideas can be an antidote to the tragedies of the world. Dante conjured up tremendous images with the power of his words. It’s not just about what is written or spoken. It’s about embarking on a journey that tasks us with imagining the future.
Much the same could be said of that second great romantic, William Blake. While “Jerusalem” remains a staple of Labour’s songbook, its call for mythical salvation at every possible public opportunity is seldom discussed in any political sense today. Writing at the dawn of industrialisation, Blake was at pains to warn of the shift to mechanisation and the unwieldy power of the technological advance. As he suggested: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake’s resistance was to create one of the quintessential designs of the age, The Ancient of Days, which shows the God Urizen (who was the new deity for this industrious time) looking down upon the earth. The tyranny of technology for Blake was evident. As he recited:
“What demon
Hath form’d this abominable void,
This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? Some said
‘It is Urizen.’ But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark power hid.”
Blake’s vision has never been more relevant. The only myth we are seemingly allowed to believe in today is the myth of technology, with all its dubious claims of connectivity, enrichment and improvement. Just look at the ways in which we are presented with the latest AI imaging as if it’s akin to a Biblical miracle, while the rest of us look on in a state of bewilderment at the banality of it all. Blake, by contrast, provided a strident warning against the fetishism of technologically driven progressivism, offering a powerful defence of the power of the arts.
Yet today, can we name a single political party who didn’t promise to somehow improve our lives and make the necessary efficiency savings by appealing to more technology? And how many placed the importance of investing heavily in the arts and humanities a cornerstone of their policies?
For all the talk about the future, it was telling that the issue of higher education was barely mentioned during the campaign. It was also telling as the campaigns unfolded, that one of the country’s leading arts universities — Goldsmiths of London — has been left to fall on the free-market sword that was wantonly placed into its hands.
Short of pulling back on its promise to provide free tertiary education, Labour’s fixation on growth and jobs points to a continuation of the policy where the value of degrees is bound to salary prospects. I’ve never met a single arts student who believes they may earn as much as a banker. Yet it’s pretty clear who is more important to any collective vision for society. Indeed, as Blake maintained, the arts are not just some fanciful cultural pastime. They are essential to the “destruction of tyrannies”.
And without them? Perhaps we shall soon find out, living in our own Dantesque wilderness of doubt. The question, then, will be which path to take. Will we, against the odds, recover something vital? Or will we walk among the trees like automated zombies, led by dead ideas towards an unclear future that only replenishes our cynicism.
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SubscribeThere’s very little to add to that, except to applaud the writer for calling out the sheer inhumanity of those seeking to exploit this horrendous crime.
I note that you choose not to call out the “sheer inhumanity” of the people who carried out this crime.
Because you don’t have to.
What a seemingly gormless remark Sham Brain!
I assume that was one of your usual plonking attempts at provocation.
And you responded to it.
People have no shame.
Certainly, some trans rights activists have no shame.
It’s a very good article, except for the misgendering of Brianna, who was a boy and should therefore be referred to using male pronouns.
Activists will do what activists do. They are never interested in solutions, only the perpetuation of whatever problem they represent. Because the perpetuation gives them relevance, a platform, and on occasion, a livelihood. The facts never matter.
Don’t forget funding and jobs.
Indeed. Think Equity & Inclusion Consultants, Diversity Champions, Sensitivity Readers … nothing lets you know your ideology is on the right lines more than the sweet sound of ker-ching.
The trans ideologues are clearly upset by the fact that all the reports emerging from the case are indicative that the victim was not murdered because of “transphobia”.
It would have been just so incredibly helpful to them if “transphobia” was behind it. They must be cursing the killers for only be deranged, rather than to have been found to have been obsessively following JK Rowling, Graham Linehan, and other “transphobes” on social media.
With the proverbial egg on their faces, predictably some have chosen to double down. India Willoughby’s foolish post on X should ensure that he will be very busy with our learned friends in 2024.
You’re right. Legal action is the only thing that will make irresponsible commentators think twice.
*Mr Indius Willoughby’s foolish post on X should ensure that he will be very busy with our learned friends in 2024.
‘India Willoughby’s foolish post on X’
To be fair, that’s very much Willoughby’s USP.
I agree with the author – but who doesn’t do this nowadays. A woman is killed – a vanishingly rare event in the U.K.- and it’s all night politicised vigils by people who never knew her. And the pretence follows that this is somehow reflective of society in general. A black man is killed by the police, and no one waits for justice to take its course – instead the streets erupt and a petty criminal gets his face all over the media.
It’s hard not to feel that activists welcome these events like a gift from the gods. It’s awful, but it’s not limited to trans activists.
Around 100 women a year are killed by men in the UK, most by current or ex-partners.
I personally wouldn’t call this “vanishingly rare.”
You have to compare it with the overall female population of the U.K. Assuming your figure to be correct I make that 1 in 350,000.
Its hard to wrap your head around those numbers, but if you imagine the canary wharf tower representing the number of women in the U.K. (like a giant bar chart) then the number killed per year would be represented by a mark just over 1/2mm from the bottom. You’d need good eyesight to see it. That is vanishingly rare.
We will never have a society in which murder never occurs. But we are remarkably close.
“You have to compare it with the overall female population of the U.K. Assuming your figure to be correct I make that 1 in 350,000.”
Is 1 in 350,000 about the “right” level of murder of UK women in your estimation, then?
Don’t be silly.
You’re just being silly. We’d all rather there were no murders at all. Men or women. That’s unlikely ever to be the case sadly. How about a grown up reply?
Sure. Here’s two.
1. Something that happens twice a week isn’t “vanishingly rare”
2. You can’t decide how much of a concern something is just by statistically frequency. Severity matters also.
Did you actually read my post. It depends on the population size. If a bird is only sighted twice a week in the whole world, it would be considered rare. If it was sighted twice a week in the average garden it would not.
More to the point – if you look at my original post, the point I am making is that activists (not just trans activists) use people’s statistical illiteracy to make political hay. Scaring people to death for no reason in the process.
“Interesting” selection of the stats there.
Around 200 women are killed in the UK per year. Who kills the rest of them? Or are they not important to you?
“Around 200 women are killed in the UK per year. Who kills the rest of them? Or are they not important to you?”
A small number – 5 to 10% – killed by other women and the rest will be unknown therefore recorded as “No known suspect”.
Given that the vast majority of women’s murders where there is a primary suspect recorded the killer is male, its reasonable to speculate that most of those No Known Suspect cases are also.
We should be more concerned about the male suicide rate, which for the UK is approaching 100 deaths per week.
100 women per year is also a small fraction of the 1463 women in England and Wales who commit suicide each year.
When resources are limited it’s the big problems that should be addressed first.
It’s not a competition.
Let’s be concerned about both male violence towards women and male suicide.
It’s entirely feasible they share some root causes anyway.
No – but if it were 2 men committing suicide a week it wouldn’t even be news. And the response would be – oh, is that all. Even when it’s 50 times that it’s not really news.
Curious to know what you think these might be?
Despair would cover both.
Interesting idea. Do you think men kill women out of despair?
Thanks for that bit of humanity. We have a long way to go before we really begin to understand each other.
That’s rich.
Women have spent the last few decades making everything a competition between men and women.
At the end of the day, if you commit suicide that’s on you. Murder is different.
But it must be of interest to society to discover what causes people to commit suicide.
A woman?
Brianna was killed because wrong place wrong time. The unhinged gender window lickers can’t make hay out of that fact though – so they will blame transphobia, capitalism,white people/climate change etc…
We’ll blame the likes of you.
You forgot patriarchy
And colonialism.
Ah, the “thoughts and prayers” approach adopted by US Republicans when there is yet another mass shooting – and just about as nauseous.
Anti trans radicals should be delighted – you hate trans kids and now you got one of them killed. Mission accomplished.
Hi
I often look at the comments section after reading a piece. I like to hear different opinions. Many of those opinions I disagree with of course. But I still find it hard to believe how quickly people can move from expressing their own opinion to utter rudeness and ridicule of another persons posting. It seems to get worse and worse as time goes on. Why? Can someone explain (without any further rudeness or aggression aimed at me. But I’m sure there will be) why there are these constant ‘emotional’ outbursts rather than any calm objective discussion of the subject being discussed? Surely you can just say you disagree and then explain why rather than resorting to insults? Or have those days finally gone now forever now we can all hide who we are on the internet?
I am putting my hard hat now and waiting….
Good question. I’m perhaps guilty of it sometimes – and it’s just pure frustration. But mostly it’s black and white thinking, side taking and a refusal to entertain an opposing view even long enough to refute it.
The trans issue brings out the worst in people. If you even try to get people to see the trans side – even partly, and even for a moment – you’ll be attacked. Sometimes unpleasantly.
Certain groups are worse than others for their inability to think. I won’t say who they are, you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.
Having said that there are some commenters I really respect, including some I cross swords with on a regular basis. I suspect I would like them in person.
Anyway your attitude sounds great. Try and stick with it and don’t get too frustrated when some people seem unwilling to listen.
If you are curious, google search for “emotional reasoning” – it explains a lot. People often mistake the strength of their feeling for proof that they are right – and that those who disagree are stupid or evil.
Of course this has been true forever. But, just a few decades ago very few people would have gotten so hateful so fast. Simple common decency; the stuff we learned in kindergarten.